And now the forecasters are saying the price cap could hit £6000

QrizB

new_owner said:

Sorry - it was a rhetorical question around new build housing. The question is we are now in 2022 and this is still not reversed - much has changed and there is simply no excuse.

Same party in government, same ideology, same approach to regulation.

To get change, we need to have change.

Apologies I wrote responses in reverse order :-)

No worries, we all do that occasionally!

daz378

I suppose  in terms of politics.. probably a liberal... it's my anecdotal impression that the last 20 years  only the bottom  20%   have only just managed  , wage stagflation/ house price rises etc...this COLC..will probably effect another 20%...the enough is enough  movement   together with the new strugglers   will be rightly very militant  for support....but  the main driver for inflation  macro international pressures....money should be spent in support   but on energy resilience ...wage push inflation gets out of hand and  possible stock market crashes...then a lot people are worried  for their pensions....interesting times 

k_man

QrizB said:

k_man said:

50p upwards seems more reasonable for an ICE for 4 miles

50p for 4 miles is 12.5p per mile. Petrol is £1.80 a ltire so 12.5p per mile would be 14.4 miles per litre, 65 mpg.

The average for a Ford Focus on fuelly.com is around 35mpg:
https://www.fuelly.com/car/ford/focus

Or for a Fiesta, maybe 40mpg?
https://www.fuelly.com/car/ford/fiesta

50p was the minimum assuming the most efficient petrols cars, which claim 55 to 60 mpg

And petrol is only £1.67 up north.

Obviously not many petrol cars average that high but similarly not all EVs average 4 m/kWh either.

80p just seemed high. That said, a few months ago, it would have been.

James284

Perhaps it needs to go in the inflation column, this whole forum is about costs going through the roof but surely we have lived with it for ages in different ways.  

I don't understand the logic of it, perhaps this is because I have autism and get confused by logic.  I don't dispute the seriousness -  I created a spreadsheet to forecast my costs in 2024... which is horrible.. but my neighbours who claim they are broke pay minimal rent have bought these inflatable heated jacuzzi spas (which must be at least 3kw when they are on), chucked a sofa in the front garden, which I realise some people see this as a joke / silly comment, but I don't understand that - in reality if it were me I would have sold / given an old sofa away - even if it is bad condition, why have it hanging around - someone will surely get use out of it.  We used some recycled sofas for 2 years from friends when we were younger and we were extremely grateful.  Once it gets waterlogged outside it is impossible to move and then you are stuck with it and no one will ever take it so it just ruins your front garden until you move it.  My Dad often visits and sees the sofas in the front garden and says that they are posh people who can afford to buy an outside sofa... but I'm sure he is joking to wind me up, right!?  You wouldn't ever sit on it outside properly, it would be wet and stinky?  

Also, I noticed our neighbours stand outside with their front doors open continuously at all hours and smoking, a few use electronic vapes which I guess must be cheaper now but others use rolled ones.  That doesn't make sense to me either, besides wanting people to come up to you to talk with an open door (which I hate social chatting, and what do you talk about since you saw them the last 15 mins), and making your house cold, if you look at the graph for ciagrette prices they have been at least 10% inflation year on year and no one ever moaned about that then.  I did think if they were buying them illegally etc. , in which case the price stays the same maybe - possibly I don't know.  Now it is bread / gas etc. it becomes important.. but the inflation for cigarettes etc. hasn't changed so why are they moaning about it.    Sorry I don't mean to be offensive by the way. 










  

ian1246

Our current energy use is 3750 Kwh Electricity & around 21,000 Kwh gas - luckily we re fixed until next August. We re going to use the next 12 months to save up at least a £10,000 buffer which we can use to either pay off debt (student loan), retain in a bank (dip into for bills) or invest in Solar Panels.

One of our main energy expenses is the tumble dryer- i.e. we have a 14month old Baby who sometimes leaks or is sick on his bed sheets. We only have 2 double sheets & 2 mattress protectors for his bed, so the result is when that happens we have to stick them onto wash/dry straight away (since we wouldn't have a spare if it happened again, since the spare set is being used to replace the soiled set).

Solution? We ll just get a 3rd set for each --massively reducing our need to use the tumble drier. We ll also invest in a 2nd clothes airer to go in the spare  room and move the dehumidifier in there - hopefully allowing us to dry normal washing without using the tumble drier.

As for Gas - we had cavity insulation installed recently, so that should drop as a result. We can also I suspect massively save by making sure to have the back door shut (typically we leave it open for the dogs a lot).  We've also turned the boiler temperature down.

Little comparatively painless actions like the above should hopefully make a big difference in energy use. Hopefully other households have the same ability to make changes/gains.

PennyForThem_2

ian1246 - are you in a house (cavity wall insulation) and do you have an outside space where you could fix a washing line?  If so, dry as much stuff as you can outside.  If it rains and gets a bit wet, no problem, it is probably drier than when you pulled it from the washer.

I dry all my stuff outside most of the time, even when working full time.  Had a TD for emergencies only and it gets used maybe 3 times a year.

MattMattMattUK

new_owner said:

I do find myself disagreeing with several posts on here.

We should not be asking people to cut back on energy use or use an extra layer of clothes to keep warm.

Actually we should, many people keep their homes too hot, and why put an additional burden on energy imports when one could simply wear a jumper?

new_owner said:

I look at the planning process for wind / solar farms and the associated costs that this entails and see the whole process is so broken I don't see how this will be fixed in the near future.

Forget planning for solar and wind, have you seen how much the planning for nuclear gets dragged out? Yes planning should probably be simplified, but generally it is the NIMBYs that cause the problem, rather than the process itself.

new_owner said:

I do put the blame firmly onto the government. They have made the investment in renewables expensive, time-consuming and limiting. Energy self-reliance should have been part of this country's future for years and especially with leaving the EU, not making expensive appeasing handouts part of any policy or substitution or hoping that nothing would happen to change a markets.

I partially blame the government, governments of all colours should should have hugely invested in nuclear, the best time to have started that was twenty years ago, the best time for them to start a large scale nuclear building program is now. However the second issue is the electorate, they keep voting in awful governments, the electorate are very short sighted, only vote in their short term interests and are generally very selfish. 

new_owner said:

Electricity needs to be so cheap and plentiful in the future that people can add a Heat Pump without worrying about the running costs or checking the usage of the fridge freezer and encouraging the use of EV's. How can this country hit Net Zero with this current government?

Electricity should not be cheap, it should be priced reasonably, according to cost, but we should take control of that cost ourselves by building a lot of nuclear and renewable capacity. Properly installed and used ASHPs are somewhat more expensive than gas to operate, but gas needs to be phased out anyway so that will be irrelevant, GSHPs are as or more efficient cost wise compared to gas and more of them need to be installed. The problem with hitting net zero is not the government, it is the population, almost none are willing to make the lifestyle changes required, even fewer are prepared to fund the cost.

new_owner said:

Why are new houses not built to a better standard? In this day and age, they should be almost self-sustaining for most of the year or in the summer producing more electricity than they can use. 

New houses are not built to a better standard because it costs more and most of the public are not willing to accept the cost increases. 

new_owner said:

Why is the ongoing issue of insulation still an issue? I see more houses without solar than with.

There is not really an ongoing issue with insulation, there are multiple solutions for properties, cavity wall, external cladding, loft, double and triple gazing, well sealed modern doors etc. The issue with the pressure groups is that generally they want the government, rather than the homeowner to pay for the installation and that means from taxes, which means taxes would have to rise. I would rather taxes went on health care, social care, education, or building more generation capacity than increasing the value of a homeowners private property and the electorate in general seem largely unwilling to pay for anything more than the bare essentials. 

new_owner said:

Why are there so few Battery Energy Storage Parks? Why not subsidise the cost of renewables more so there is more energy available?

Batteries are expensive and the overall savings are marginal, they also require large daily or weekly variations in production and demand to make them worthwhile, something which generally in the UK we do not have.

new_owner said:

Why not subsidise the cost of renewables more so there is more energy available? 

Renewables alone will not solve the problem, they will not even come close and subsidising domestic renewables is not a solution. Large scale renewables is already commercially viable and is being built at scale already.

new_owner said:

I realise that in winter this will be more limited but I would rather see investment in tidal than nuclear. 

Winter is our greatest demand by some way, wind can help there but solar generation falls off a cliff. Tidal can provide some regular capacity, but the places to build it also cause a large environmental impact (Severn Tidal as an example). Nuclear is the only viable solution for security of supply all year round, we also already have enough uranium to power our entire energy requirements for nearly a thousand years and that is before we used plutonium or reprocessed spent fuel.

new_owner said:

FIT was a mistake and only benefited those few who could afford the investment at the time. £5000 Heat Pump grant is another mistake and handing out large sums of money to try and reduce home users' energy costs, is yet another. The whole energy market needs to be re-done and properly invested in. If electricity was cheap people would naturally move over their heating/hot water to electricity as the cost of gas increased out of control and this is something that only the government can do.

Both were designed to get the industry off the ground, which is what they did. A lot of installers were trained up to work on those schemes, the supply networks were put in place, the legislative details were sorted for grid connections etc. Now that economies of scale are much better and getting better every year the industry is self sustaining. 

new_owner said:

I see people posting low electrical consumption and worrying about the future cost or seeing posts saying that we should be reducing our consumption. An EV or two and Heat Pump are going to be pushing consumption to numbers of 50kWh + per day per household. That's what £22 per day ish with the October price increase.

Those who are buying EVs are unlikely to be struggling with their energy bills, on top of that EVs are still considerably cheaper per mile than IC vehicles so they will be better off overall per mile. An ASHP will be more expensive than gas, but not hugely if it is used right, a GSHP is going to cost around the same as gas overall, but both should also be installed with considerable insulation upgrades which will further reduce the overall heat demand. 

MattMattMattUK

ian1246 said:

Our current energy use is 3750 Kwh Electricity & around 21,000 Kwh gas - luckily we re fixed until next August. We re going to use the next 12 months to save up at least a £10,000 buffer which we can use to either pay off debt (student loan), retain in a bank (dip into for bills) or invest in Solar Panels.

One of our main energy expenses is the tumble dryer- i.e. we have a 14month old Baby who sometimes leaks or is sick on his bed sheets. We only have 2 double sheets & 2 mattress protectors for his bed, so the result is when that happens we have to stick them onto wash/dry straight away (since we wouldn't have a spare if it happened again, since the spare set is being used to replace the soiled set).

Solution? We ll just get a 3rd set for each --massively reducing our need to use the tumble drier. We ll also invest in a 2nd clothes airer to go in the spare  room and move the dehumidifier in there - hopefully allowing us to dry normal washing without using the tumble drier.

As for Gas - we had cavity insulation installed recently, so that should drop as a result. We can also I suspect massively save by making sure to have the back door shut (typically we leave it open for the dogs a lot).  We've also turned the boiler temperature down.

Little comparatively painless actions like the above should hopefully make a big difference in energy use. Hopefully other households have the same ability to make changes/gains.

Buy a third or fourth set for starters, also get a dehumidifier and you can dry the clothes indoors, it will cost a fraction of the cost of the tumble dryer. 

ScoobyZ

Scary thing is, in a few years time we could be looking back and wishing it was ONLY £3k.

We were all shocked at the March 22 rise. 5-6k does seem crazy.

markin

If the mattress protectors can't just be wiped with a damp cloth they are the wrong kind.